El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (79 page)

“Dog!” roared the chief, whirling on Yar Muhammad, who sprang back, being without a gun. Yakub Khan fired from the hip and the bullet sheared a tuft from the Waziri’s beard. Yar Muhammad yelled a curse and ran behind the idol’s pedestal.

At the crack of the shot O’Donnell was leaping to grapple with the chief, but even as he sprang he saw he would fail. With a snarl Yakub turned the rifle on him, and in that fleeting instant O’Donnell knew death would spit from that muzzle before he could reach the Jowaki. Yakub’s finger hooked the trigger — and then Yar Muhammad hurled the idol. His mighty muscles creaked as he threw it.

Full against the Jowaki it crashed, bearing him backward — over the lip of the chasm! He fired wildly as he fell, and O’Donnell felt the wind of the bullet. One frenzied shriek rang to the roof as idol and man vanished together.

Stunned, O’Donnell sprang forward and gazed down into the black depths. He looked and listened long, but no sound of their fall ever welled up to him. He shuddered at the realization of that awful depth, and drew back in voluntarily. A hard hand on his shoulder brought him around to look into the grinning, bearded countenance of Yar Muhammad.

“Thou art my comrade henceforth,” said the Waziri. “If thou art he who calls himself Ali el Ghazi, is it true that a
Ferengi
lurks beneath those garments?”

O’Donnell nodded, watching the man narrowly.

Yar Muhammad but grinned the more widely.

“No matter! I have slain the chief I followed, and the hands of his tribe will be lifted against me. I must follow another chief — and I have heard many tales of the deeds of Ali el Ghazi! Wilt thou accept me as thy follower,
sahib?”

“Thou art a man after mine own heart,” said O’Donnell, extending his hand, white man fashion.

“Allah favor thee!” Yar Muhammad exclaimed joyously, returning the strong grip. “And now let us go swiftly! The Jowakis will be here before many hours have passed, and they must not find us here! But there is a secret path beyond this temple which leads down into the valley, and I know hidden trails that will take us out of the valley and far beyond their reach before they can get here. Come!”

O’Donnell took up his weapons and followed the Waziri out of the temple. The idol was gone forever, but it had been the price of his life. And there were other lost treasures that challenged a restless adventurer. Already his Irish mind was flying ahead to the search of hidden, golden hoards celebrated in a hundred other legends.

“Alhamdolillah!”
he said, and laughed with the sheer joy of living as he followed the Waziri to the place where they had left the tethered horses.

The Fire of Asshurbanipal

The Fire of Asshurbanipal

Yar Ali squinted carefully down the blue barrel of his Lee-Enfield, called devoutly on Allah and sent a bullet through the brain of a flying rider.

“Allaho akbar!” the big Afghan shouted in glee, waving his weapon above his head. “God is great! By Allah, sahib, I have sent one of the dogs to Hell!”

His companion peered cautiously over the rim of the sand pit they had scooped with their hands. He was a lean and wiry American, Steve Clarney by name.

“Good work, old horse,” said this person. “Four left. Look — they’re drawin’ off.”

The white-robed horsemen were indeed reining away, clustering together just out of accurate rifle-range, as if in council. There had been seven when they had first swooped down on the comrades, but the fire from the two rifles in the sand pit had been deadly.

“Look, sahib — they abandon the fray!”

Yar Ali stood up boldly and shouted taunts at the departing riders, one of whom whirled and sent a bullet that kicked up sand thirty feet in front of the pit.

“They shoot like sons of dogs,” said Yar Ali in complacent self-esteem. “By Allah, did you see that rogue plunge from his saddle as my shot went home? Up, sahib, let us run after them and cut them down!”

Paying no attention to this outrageous proposal — for he knew it was but one of the gestures Afghan nature continually demands — Steve rose, dusted
off his breeches, and gazing after the riders, who were now white specks on the desert, said musingly: “Those fellows ride like they had some set purpose in their minds — not a lot like men runnin’ from a lickin’.”

“Aye,” agreed Yar Ali promptly and seeing nothing inconsistent with his present attitude and recent bloodthirsty suggestion. “They ride after more of their kind — they are hawks who give up their prey not quickly. We had best move our position quickly, Steve sahib. They will come back — maybe in a few hours — maybe in a few days — it all depends on how far away lies the oasis of their tribe. But they will be back. We have guns and lives — they want both.

“And behold.”

The Afghan levered out his last empty shell and slipped a single cartridge into the breech of his rifle.

“My last bullet, sahib.”

Steve nodded. “I’ve got three left.”

He lifted his canteen and shook it. Not much water remained. He knew that Yar Ali had a little more than he. The big Afghan, bred himself in a barren land, needed less water than did the American, though the latter, judged from a white man’s standards, was hard and tough as a wolf. As he unscrewed the canteen cap and drank very sparingly, Steve mentally reviewed the chain of events that had led them to their present position.

Wanderers, soldiers of fortune, thrown together by chance and attracted to each other by mutual admiration, he and Yar Ali had wandered from India up through Turkestan and down through Persia, an oddly assorted but highly capable pair. Driven by the restless urge of the inherent wanderlust, their avowed purpose — which they swore to and sometimes believed themselves — was the accumulation of some vague and undiscovered treasure — some pot of gold at the foot of some unborn rainbow.

Then in ancient Shiraz they had heard of the Fire of Asshurbanipal. From the lips of an ancient Persian trader, who only half believed what he repeated to them, they heard the tale that he in turn had heard in his distant youth. He had been a member of a caravan, fifty years before, which, wandering far on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf in quest of pearls, had followed the tale of a rare pearl far into the desert. The pearl, rumored found by a diver and stolen by a sheik of the interior, they did not find, but they did pick up a Turk who was dying of starvation, thirst and a bullet wound in the thigh. As he died in delirium, he babbled a wild tale of a silent dead city of black stone set in the drifting sands of the desert far to the westward, and of a flaming gem clutched in the bony fingers of a skeleton on an ancient throne.

He had not dared bring it away with him, because of an overpowering brooding horror that haunted the place, and thirst had driven him from the silent city into the desert where Bedouins had pursued and wounded him; he
had escaped, riding hard until his horse fell under him. He died without telling how he had reached the mythical city in the first place, but the old trader thought he must have come from the northwest — a deserter from the Turkish army, making a desperate attempt to reach the Gulf.

The men of the caravan had made no attempt to plunge still further into the desert in search of the city, for, said the old trader, they believed it to be the ancient City of Evil spoken of in the Necronomicon of the mad Alhazred — the city of the dead on which an ancient curse rested. And the gem was that ancient and accursed jewel belonging to a king of long ago whom the Grecians called Sardanapalus and the Semitic peoples Asshurbanipal.

Steve had been fascinated by the tale. Admitting to himself that it was doubtless one of the ten thousand cock-and-bull myths mooted about the East — still, there was always a possibility. And Yar Ali had heard hints before of a silent city of the sands; tales had followed the east-bound caravans over the high Persian uplands and across the sands of Turkestan, into the mountain country and beyond — vague tales, guarded whispers of a black city of the genii, deep in the hazes of a haunted desert.

So following the trail of the legend, the companions had come from Shiraz to the Arabian shore of the Persian Gulf, and there had heard more from an old man who had been a diver for pearls in his youth. The loquacity of age was on him, and he told tales repeated to him by wandering tribesmen who had them in turn from the wild nomads of the deep interior — and again Steve and Yar Ali heard of the still black city with giant beasts carved of stone, and the skeleton sultan who held the blazing gem.

And so, mentally swearing at himself for a fool, Steve had made the plunge, and Yar Ali, secure in the knowledge that all things lay on the lap of Allah, had come with him. Their scanty money had been just sufficient to provide riding camels and provisions for a bold flying invasion of the unknown. Their only chart had been the vague rumors that placed the supposed location of the City of Evil.

There had been days of hard travel, pushing the beasts and conserving water and food. Then a blinding sand-wind in which they had lost the camels. After that, long miles of staggering through the sands, battered by a flaming sun, subsisting on rapidly dwindling water, and food Yar Ali had in a pouch. No thought of finding the mythical city now. They went on in hope of stumbling upon a spring; they knew that behind them no oases lay within a distance they could hope to cover on foot. It was a desperate chance but their only one.

Then white-clad hawks had swooped down on them out of the haze of the skyline, and from a shallow and hastily scooped trench, the adventurers had exchanged shots with the wild riders who circled them at top speed. The
bullets of the Bedouins had skipped through their make-shift fortifications, knocking dust into their eyes and flicking bits of cloth from their garments, but by good chance neither of them had been hit.

Their one bit of luck, reflected Steve, as he cursed himself for a fool. What a mad venture it had been, anyway! To think that two men could so dare the desert and live, much less wrest from its abysmal bosom the secrets of the ages! And that crazy tale of a skeleton hand gripping a flaming gem in a dead city — bosh! What utter rot. He must have been crazy himself, the American decided, with the clarity of view that suffering and danger bring.

“Well, old horse,” said Steve, lifting his rifle, “let’s get goin’. It’s a toss-up if we die of thirst or get sniped off by the desert-brothers. Anyway, we’re doin’ no good here.”

“God gives,” agreed Yar Ali cheerfully. “The sun sinks westward. Soon the coolness of night will be upon us. Perhaps we will find water yet, sahib. Look, the terrain changes to the south.”

Steve shaded his eyes against the dying sun. Beyond a level, barren expanse of several miles in width, the land did indeed tend to become more broken; aborted hills were in evidence. The American slung his rifle over his arm and sighed.

“Heave ahead, old horse; we’re food for the buzzards anyhow.”

The sun sank and the moon rose, flooding the desert with weird silver light. Drifted sand glimmered in long ripples, as if a sea had suddenly been frozen into immobility. Steve, parched fiercely by a thirst he dared not fully quench, cursed beneath his breath. The desert was beautiful beneath the moon, with the beauty of a cold marble Lorelei to lure men to destruction. What a mad quest, his weary brain repeated; the Fire of Asshurbanipal retreated into the mazes of unreality with each step. The desert became not
merely a material waste, but the greyness of the lost eons, in whose depths dreamed sunken things.

Steve stumbled and swore; was he failing already? Yar Ali swung along with the easy, tireless stride of the mountain man and Steve set his teeth, nerving himself to greater effort. They were entering the broken country at last and the going became harder. Shallow gullies and narrow ravines knifed the earth with wavering patterns. Most of them were nearly filled with sand and there was no trace of water anywhere.

“This country was once oasis country,” commented Yar Ali. “Allah knows how many centuries ago the sand took it, as the sand has taken so many cities in Turkestan.”